Andie

Thanks for even thinking of pursuing this one. I have had my faith in the world of IT restored once again by this fantastic site. Kaleidos (the RM system) works by allowing you to manually enter your email address, a display name and a note about yourself in something it calls a profile. By default, you get access to this on the home page of the main school group you belong to, through the settings web part that is there by default; if you are staff, this is the Staff home page, if you are a pupil, this is the Pupil home page, etc. However, I have no idea where that info is stored and it does not appear to be linked to the username that you log in with. From the home page you can then get to what is called your Personal Space. But RM have said this is a separate site, even though you access this from the default home page and without logging on again. RM have said that there is a separate profile attached to this Personal Space; but you can't get to add your email address, display name and so on to it manually unless you add the setting web part to your Personal Space page. You can add a completely different set of details to this profile; the two profiles don't update each other. I know because i tested it and sent the screenshots to RM. On top of that, users can create Interest Groups. These can be created on the Staff/Pupil site you belong to, or on the Personal Space you have. These also seem to have profiles attached to them, which may or may not get their details from the site they are attached to. After some editing, I actually had three different profiles with completely different details all accessed through my one username. Are you following all this out there? No? Thought not... The problem with our LEA is that no one had told us about needing to add the settings web part to our Personal Spaces. And some of the Interest Groups which were created, and which presumably took user details from those Personal Spaces, were then not sending out alerts to members about those Interest Groups. We all thought that we had done all the profile stuff when we added our email addresses to our profiles on our Staff home pages. Back to the dark room now...

Does it??? Or were you being sarcastic? I think what makes sense is that, if I log on, and get access to lots of "sites", then my user details are shared in one form for all those sites. But maybe i just like things to be simple - probably in the wrong job then.

It's ok folks. You can forget I ever asked. RM have replied and it seems the behaviour that was driving me mad in Kaleidos is normal in Sharepoint. Basically, each site you have access to has it's own profile. So you have to add your email address to a profile for your Staff Home, and your Personal Space, and, as far as I can make out, each Interest Group you belong to as well. The profile isn't attached solely to your username, but to your username+site. I am now going to lie down in a very dark room for a very long time...

Busy I can cope with. It's being ignored that upsets me... But, surely, in all the thousands of edugeekers out there, there must be more than just you using Kaleidos???

Anyone?? Surely there must be a user base out there in all these edugeekers....

There is still a problem, possibly depending on the supplier. We purchased some laptops at the start of the year from an educational hardware supplier, with XP installed, but the recovery disk and product key attached to the machine are Vista. So if you get a fault that involves reinstalling the op sys, you may have a problem, although in my current case I had other XP disks and the supplier has been able to give me the XP volume licence key. I would recommend you keep all your old CDs!!!

I'm not sure if it will happen straight away to everyone. Our cachepilot box was installed by the LEA with one year of Espresso free, about 5 years ago. If we didn't want Espresso after that, the LEA allowed us to keep the box, although we did decide to keep Espresso and used eLcs to pay for it. I discovered that there was only storage on the box for about 5 years of Espresso updates from the trainer who came out for the first training session. But I'd lost track of time....I assume the LEA covered the one-off installation cost of the box from Espresso. Our renewal comes up in August, and the letter states: "As you may be aware [nope], the cache server being used to store and receive updates to the Espresso service is coming to the end of its working life and is running out of disk space. In addition, Centreprise no longer support the cache for warranty and repairs." So it is unclear whether this will affect you all (because of warranty and repairs), or only those who have had their cache boxes for 5 years. I still think it was a good idea to warn you!

ICT Technician. The King's School, Peterborough. £14,197 - £14,882 Part of a team of three - Systems manager, Senior techie, ICT techie. Details via the link from the school website here: The King's School - Current Vacancies

My feeling exactly, but for some reason it ain't working as expected in this LEA at least. RM have agreed that something's not right, and are now investigating the issue. To be fair to their support guys, they have always responded promptly to my requests, and even if I don't like the reply (ie. "it can't be done or it doesn't have that functionality") I can't fault them for pursuing a problem and not fobbing me off straight away. However, something odd is happening with profiles. I emailed one user of Kaleidos in this LEA directly using the address that came up when I clicked her name in a discussion board, and she emailed back to say that she had changed the email address in her profile days ago from her home address to her work address, and now realised that it wasn't updating elsewhere on the system! Russell, I don't know how far down the line you are with using Kaleidos, and whether you have Interest Groups and discussion boards set up, and I appreciate you are already busy. But if you do get a moment, can you just experiment by changing your email address in your profile and then seeing if that change is replicated on other parts of the portal where your profile can be accessed? Do you know if alerts are working for your Interest Groups? I know it is just as quick in a small school to tell people you've created a group, but Kaleidos is supposed to mean we can create groups across clusters of schools for collaboration, and if alerts aren't working then it doesn't bode well for the rest of the system. With thanks in advance for any help. And if there are any other Kaleidos users out there...!!

Sorry. Not making myself clear again. I know how to enter my email address in change profile. I have done so on the Staff Home page. My issue/problem is that, having entered my email address into the profile on the Staff Home page, I am not getting email alerts when I am added to an Interest Group. Other users in this LEA are having the same problem. This may be because I also have to put the settings web part onto my Personal Space, click on Change Profile, and enter my email address there too. But I can't find any place in the manuals, or was not told on the training that this was necessary, and I wanted a user of Kaleidos to try and confirm that I needed to do this. My belief was that Kaleidos was an integrated package, and that I would only have to enter information about myself once. It seems that I am now being told that I have to enter the same information onto every site I have access to, even though I log in with one username.

Just alerting folk: Our latest renewal notice from Espresso has informed us that the Cachepilot box has come to the end of its working life. They are charging £150 for a new Linux server to store Espresso on (includes the installation and configuration), plus a compulsory charge of £250 for maintenance. We can't renew Espresso without the hardware upgrade. I'm not sure how good these prices are, though they seem quite reasonable. The problem for us is that the LEA bought Espresso and the Cachepilot for everyone, and then left us to pay for the renewal after a year. Now we have probably been landed with an unexpected extra cost, on top of losing eLcs which we used to renew Espresso with before. Teachers have found Espresso more and more useful since we got the IWBs a year ago so we can't just ditch it without some thought, and we haven't long in which to make the decision. I thought folks might like some extra warning.

Can someone using Kaleidos help save my sanity, as I'm in danger of going mad with this problem?? I didn't receive an email alert about an Interest Group created by our LEA. I just stumbled across it in my Personal Space. When I enquired about why I didn't get an alert, it was suggested that I didn't have my email address in my profile page. But I'd added that during the portal admin training - using the Settings web part on the Staff Home page. Then another LEA user complained when they created Interest Groups in school no one was being alerted to the groups by email. They had added members as individuals, not groups, as the latter can cause problems with alerts, but no alerts had been generated. So I raised this with RM. They think, after I hinted, that the likely cause is that users (myself included) haven't added their email addresses to their Personal Space profiles (as opposed to their profiles on the Staff Home). But that is because no one told them to do that in the training, I don't think it says to do that in the manual, and the Settings web part isn't on the Personal Space site by default - users have to add it. I have been playing around with updating the Profile on both the Staff Home and the Personal Space, and they don't seem to update each other, which seems to be what users would expect as the information all relates to their username. The LEA Interest Group has loads of members, who have all done the portal admin training, but if you bring up the user list for that group only 5% show any email address against their name. Mine is only there because I added it in manually to the user list. I have been going round in circles with this one with RM. I have created a test Interest Group on my Personal Space and added the users who have done the training, but so far no one seems to have received an alert. Am I going completely mad?? Have I missed something fundamental about Interest Groups and alerts? Can someone else out there, using this package, give me a definitive answer to this issue? Or point me to the relevant part of the manual that tells you what you must do to get alerts working properly?

Collins got back to me by email. They sent me three documents that should have helped. One says that I should have unblocked Apache HTTP Server, and another talks about putting 127.0.0.1 in the exceptions box for the proxy settings in LAN Connections in IE (which I tried, but that just seemed to create a different browser error). Anyway, I've emailed them back to tell them how I fixed the problem, and I wait for them to tell me why I shouldn't have done it that way...!! In the meantime, I am attaching the official guides from Collins for anyone else who has problems. I don't take any responsibilty for them as I haven't used them to fix my problem! Their website is still being revamped; the domain name has been changed, although you do get redirected if you just put in http://www.collinseducation.com (to a beta site with .co.uk instead of com). Collins also sent me a weblink to some FAQs, but it doesn't work, probably because of the revamp. Here are the docs. They include instructions for RM CC3 networks. InstallationGuide.doc TroubleShootingGuide.doc Opening the firewall port.doc

Ah, my job is just to get the software up and running - the teacher is testing it on approval !

Sorted. Tried a few things. All I needed to do was add 127.0.0.1 as a trusted site in Symantec Internet Security. For those who don't know, as I didn't, this is the default IP address for localhost. For those, like me, who like detailed instructions: Open Internet Security. Click on Client Firewall, then Configure (button on right hand side on my version). Click on the Networking tab, on Trusted Sites, and then on the Add button. Type 127.0.0.1 and then OK everything. Think that's correct! Edit: See posting below for official guidance from Collins on how to fix installations of this software!

I got a number for IT at Collins, but all they do is take details and then pass them on to their educational support team. Is it safe for me to change the Symantec Internet Security settings from Block All to Permit All for Apache HTTP Server? If not, is there another way to do this? I have installed Collins Primary Literacy as standalone on a laptop running XP and IE6. When I click on the desktop shortcut that is supposed to run the program, the web browser opens with http://localhost9790...etc as address but I get a "Cannot find server" error with "The page cannot be displayed". It looks like it is trying to connect to 127.0.0.1 at the bottom of the browser window. As I said earlier, when I installed the software, Symantec Internet Security recommended that I block all connections to/from apache server and I haven't adjusted that setting. Any ideas on the best fix?

Mmm.. This comment from above links sort of sums it up: "My son tried to set fire to his school. I couldn't believe that the school let him do it. All he had to do was climb over a fence at night, pour petrol into the window and throw a match at it. The building went up a treat, but my poor little lamb could have hurt himself and it's all the school's fault. They should have stopped him. Iain Fraser Dartford, Monday 23 June 2008" We had a near miss last year with a year 6 class. They were doing a year end play set in the Wild West, and the teacher decided to do some costume research. Got them to do a Google image search on the word cowboys or cowboy - can't remember which - and one image came up that we certainly hadn't expected. Fortunately it was thumbnail when we spotted it first over someone's shoulder, and I was able to divert attention at the desktop that it appeared on, whilst the teacher promptly got the class to change their search terms. You can't guarantee that any search result will be pure, however innocently entered, particularly with image searches which somehow seem to bypass the safesearch settings. And the pupil under discussion here certainly doesn't appear to have been innocently searching. There surely has to be some element of personal responsibility. I am assuming that the teacher of the class didn't give their pupils that search term! Does the school in question have an AUP for pupils??

Thanks. That may be some help, but I can't do a network install at present as we only have a single copy on 30 days approval, which the Collins rep has given to a teacher. Going to sit down and try and puzzle it out now.

I got given this to install yesterday afternoon as a standalone on a staff laptop, as a teacher had tried it and couldn't get it to work. Possibly because we have IE6, or because I don't have knowledge of apache; Symantec Internet Security recommended blocking this and I went for the recommendation. What has really annoyed me is that the IT help page, and the whole Collins Education website, is currently out of action, so I couldn't even look for help with this; and the announcement on the temp home page says it will be back on Tuesday 24th June - and at 10pm it clearly isn't. Grr!! But well done edugeekers for pointing out the problems with this software here. I may be back tomorrow for some more help!

We had a similar problem with an HP Business Inkjet. It was the USB port. As already suggested, try another USB port and if that doesn't work, try and find another cable.

Are there any other problems, like not picking up group policy? Just in case, I am including a link to a problem I had a while back, where machines had been given fixed IP addresses and there were missing DNS A and PTR records. http://www.edugeek.net/forums/networks/16379-not-picking-up-group-policies-profiles.html

Wow! What a lucky little baby! Both parents doting on him/her for a whole five months! All the very best (and @Witch is correct when she says it's a harder job!).

Sorted. It was the application, not the driver. I was printing the same photo from XP and Win2k, by opening with the default application. On Win2k this is Microsoft Photo Editor, which was discontinued from Office 2003 onwards. It obviously can't cope with the new printer! Annoying, but understandable if you are still running old kit and old software. I printed something from Word in colour and it's fine.

Always worth checking the blindingly obvious with me... But, yes, I have checked the greyscale isn't set in printing prefs - surprisingly for me, one of the first things I checked before asking for help! Must be getting better at this troubleshooting lark!

Ok. Have run further tests and followed your suggestions - though I agree I shouldn't have to be installing locally! Now a bit baffled, but here is a summary of results so far and maybe someone can work out what is happening!! 1. I had only printed either the test page direct from the server or as a technician user where the printer is connected by a login script. The server test page had colour in the right place, the XP client printed a photo in colour and the Win2k client printed in black and white/grayscale. 2. I logged in as domain admin on a Win2k client. Used add printer to add the printer as a network printer, and printed a picture to the printer - black and white. 3. I logged in as domain admin on a Win2k client. Used add printer to add a local (not plug and play) printer, creating a port with the IP address of the printer but not sharing it. Used the CD that came with the printer when prompted, and asked to overwrite the existing files. Test page printed with colour Windows logo. 4. Used same client as in step 3 and still logged on as domain admin. Printed colour picture. Still black and white!!! 5. Same client and login as steps 3 and 4. Used Start>Settings>Printers, right clicked the 2605dn printer, chose Properties, clicked on Print Test Page. Colour Windows logo printed. So the test page prints in colour from the Win2k clients but colour pictures don't???!!!